My Barbarian: Post-Paradise, Sorry Again
Thursday and Friday, July 3 and 4, 2008 - 7:30 pm
New Museum , $8 Members, $10 everybody else

The Living Theatre is one of those strange, anachronistic beasts that has steadfastly refused its consignment to the pages of history - its actually still around and kicking. It's a quirk proper to the medium that the theater everyone talks about after the fact is so very rarely vital in its own right, Beckett being perhaps the greatest exception. This was never more apparent than in the work of the Living's patron saint, Antonin Artaud, who, though a luminously brilliant thinker and writer, was a pretty disastrous theater-maker. Indeed, were it not for the Living's considerable achievements in the sixties, one could easily argue that Artaud's greatest legacy is the work of Jacques Derrida. In any case, whatever remains of the Living Theater is certainly most relevant as history; something they tacitly acknowledged by bringing back The Brig the other day. Yet their dogged, commendable persistence produces situations like the one this Thursday and Friday at the New Museum, where a young performance tribe with a cool name tucks in to its still twitching corpse. My Barbarian's piece Post-Paradise, Sorry Again, is at least partially a riff on the Living's most widely known work, Paradise Now which included, get this, nudity and the examination of social taboos. I suspect My Barbarian's work is a bit more complicated, times being what they are, but you'll have to hit the Bowery to be sure.

Half of the People Are Stoned and the Other Half Are Waiting for the Next Election
Tuesday, July 1, 2008 at 8pm
Presented by Light Industry at Industry City 55 33rd Street 3rd Floor, Brooklyn

Of all the ways the Left likes to get stoned, and they are legion, nothing confounds like a hit of historical determinism. The faith that the extended and nauseating pitch and yaw of politics will somehow resolve itself into blissful harmony has been on and off the menu for almost two hundred years. The Right, meanwhile, has turned is own version of a frightening similar eschaton into a bestselling book series, among other plastics. Hell, The German Ideology may be better written, but it certainly doesn’t sell as well. So was the 2004 election inevitable? Was the triumph of a particularly ham-fisted ideology necessary for further exposing the bankruptcies of ye old System? It is an easy pipe to smoke. Tuesday Nick Hallet curates a spate of video, performance docs, and novel media celebrating those amongst us less inclined towards doing dialectical drugs while playing electoral hooky. Artists include Jen Liu, Taylor Mac, Laura Parnes, Seth Price, Aaron Valdez, Carbon Defense League, Saul Levine, Aldo Tambellini, The Yes Men, Pink Bloque, Institute for Applied Autonomy, James Tigger! Ferguson, and Wynne Greenwood, amongst others. 80 minutes for six bucks. Tickets at the door.

This Friday is the first of two animation nights at the Phatory, the other being July 18. Featuring work by Asteriskpix, Brian Dewan, Mike Estabrook, Elise Engler, Brent Green, John Goras and Jim Torok. Jill Connor curates, 7-9pm.

Saturday at 9pm is the New York premiere of Andrew Hahn's 52-minute no-budget bio-pic of the Unabomber entitled 'Manifesto.' David Hughes stars as Ted K. At Rental Gallery, located at 120 E. Broadway, Floor 6, NY 10002

And lastly, the final 'Social Sunday' from 4-6pm at Pocket Utopia. Celebrating the last day of the current show featuring photography by Luke Abiol, Eric Hairabedian, and Kristopher Graves, refreshments available.

2nd Annual Mott Haven Open Artist Studio Tour
12-6pm, Saturday, June 28th
Mott Haven, The Bronx

This Saturday commences the 2nd annual Mott Haven Studio Tour. Start time is twelve noon at the 138 St stop on the four/five or the 138 St/3rd Ave stop on the six. Free trolleys run every half hour till five, after party at Haven Arts, 50 Bruckner Blvd. from 6pm-8pm. Printed maps available day of at the Mott Haven NYPL at 321 E 140th St; at Haven Arts; on the Bronx Culture Trolley; and at all locations on the tour. In addition Stacey Gershon, curator and independent art adviser, will lead a tour to select studios. To RSVP, please contact Laura Napier at 718-401-7866 or email.

All In The Family - Screening
8:30 sharp - June 25, 2008
Sara Meltzer Gallery, 525-531 West 26th

“There is no subject without, somewhere, aphanisis of the subject, and it is in this alienation, in this fundamental division, that the dialectic of the subject is established,” Lacan remarked in his seminar of June 3, 1964 - one of the texts cited in Peggy Ahwesh’s film Martina’s Playhouse, which is included in a group screening this Wednesday at Sara Meltzer. Aphanisis, for its part, is the old psychoanalytic term for the loss of sexual desire. Historically considered to be merely the basis for all neuroses, Lacan still managed a conceptual upgrade by arguing that all subjectivity is structurally neurotic, and thus that aphanisis is, in fact, the central process by which the signifier, inevitably on loan from the symbolic, comes to undo the classically Cartesian subject. By filming herself helping the child Martina, (she of the playhouse) to read this text out loud, Ahwesh provides one of the more delightfully knowing pedagogical diagrams in recent memory. Moreover, it is to Ahwesh’s great credit that not only does one not need know Lacan (or Bataille for that matter) to appreciate this film, but that; indeed, it frequently does a better job of illustrating his ideas than he does.

A screening organized by Laura Parnes, artists include Peggy Ahwesh, Patty Chang, Eteam, Rico Gatson, Liselot van der Heijden, Lovett/Codagnone, Kristin Lucas, Guy Ben Ner, Laura Parnes, Shannon Plumb, Barbara Pollack, and Martynka Wawrzyniak.

Art in General Fundraiser
8pm - 11pm Saturday 14 June 2008
100 Lafayette New York, NY
$100

This Saturday Art in General hosts a special kind of fundraiser, billing the event as "part benefit, part performance art event, and part live concert." Put together by dealer James Fuentes and featuring a host of promising live performances, the benefit takes palce at 100 Lafayette -- the much discussed, officially unopened joint venture club whose perhaps most notable founders include artist Spencer Sweeney and party punk Andrew W.K. The latter of the two's fingerprints is definitely all over the multi-story club, which is adorned with with no-smoking type neon signs encouraging visitors to "EVERYBODY DANCE NOW," party hard, and like such affirmations of the Good Life. The emerging space, which has already been host to a few private and not-so-private events, features an interesting interior, spacious downstairs dance floor, and full bar which will be serving complimentary cocktails and beer for fundraiser patrons. Tickets are $100 and go to benefit AiG's fantastic exhibition, residency, and public programs.

In Discussion: Lawrence Weiner and Andrew Blake
7:30pm Wednesday 11 June 2008
Swiss Institute - 495 Broadway 3rd Floor New York, NY

Mapping Correspondence Panel Discussion
6:30pm Friday 13 June 2008
Center for Book Arts - 28 W 27th St, 3rd Fl. New York, NY
$10 suggested donation

This Friday the Center for Book Arts hosts "An Authentik and Historikal Panel on the Phenomenon of Mail Art" in conjunction with the exhibition Mapping Correspondence: Mail Art in the 21st Century. Mail art here is a loosely defined categorical framework for work which conceptually or formally rests on its circulation through postal systems. The form naturally becomes an emblem of a kind of errant 20th century vanguardism developed contrary to high art mandates of singular, precious art objects whose exhibition and circulation remains deeply managed to this day. Mail Art in the 21st Century has mobilized dozens of artists invited to participate in the show, and who in turn invited more collaborators, to produce new original mail art works reflecting "the complex and varied meaning of the book, mapping, and social networking in the 21st century." Panel speakers on Friday will be A.A. Bronson, who is an artist and director of Printed Matter, Martha Wilson, an artist and founder of the Franklin Furnace Archive, and artists John Evans, Barbara Moore, and William Wilson. The panel will be moderated by John Held Jr.

Tonight at the Swiss Institute meanwhile, assistant curator Piper Marshall will lead a discussion between artist Lawrence Weiner and well known adult film director and producer Andrew Blake. The occasion of the talk is Weiner's new work currently on view at SI through 19 July, Water in Milk Exists. For the exhibition, Weiner worked with the Swiss Institute and cinematographer Kiki Allgeier to produce a new video work which the press release promises to challenge "both artistic and pornographic conventions."

Seeing Neighborhoods Anew: Art Institutions' Enactment of the Transnational
Hyun Sook Kim
POSTPONED 3pm Saturday 7 June 2008
$museum admission (12)

In a recent lecture at the New Museum, curator Okwui Enwezor spoke on what Peter Schledhal has cynically described in 1999 as the rise of "festivalism" – large scale, International and highly visible art biennales and exhibitions. The rise of such exhibitions, the massive mobilization of cultural workers and resources necessary for their production, and the inevitable contestations for power, influence, and autonomy of the various players involved inevitably precipitates all variety of strange fruit; the cancellation of the transnational manifesta 6 in 2006 by the government of Nicosia, for example, catalyzed the foundation of Anton Vidokle's monumental United Nations Plaza project in Berlin the following year, which was only the first of three of its manifestations thus far, each growing in complexity and collaborative scope. Enwezor, who is this year's Gwangju Biennale artistic director, theorized in his talk that these kinds of exhibitions are often born in response to traumatic moments in a nation's history; the three primary examples offered of his condition being Documenta's formation in response to the end of WWII (for what could Germany be after this but a cultural power?), the Johannesburg Biennale's foundation as a response to the abolishment of Apertheid, and the Gwangju Biennale modeled in part as a kind of 15 year echo to the unrest of the 1980 Gwangju Democratization Movement. These exhibitions in a sense, Enwezor suggests, negotiate a relationship between history and trauma, and produce temporary sites where international cultural production occurring in a particular locale might suspend even those deepest and most necessary tenets of national identity. It's interesting then, to consider the role of the museum and other large-scale but geographically localized (but temporally unlimited) cultural institutions and their place in civil society. If "festivalism" leads to a disruption, reconfiguration, or perhaps even an affirmation of it's host site's relationship to the past, then on what axis does one locate the quotidian operations of the museum? Tomorrow at the New Museum, sociologist Hyun Sook Kim will lecture on "art institutions' enactment of the transnational," a look at just such questions, the constituting of the local, the contemporary art institution's collapse of such locality, and the changing role of institutions with their relationship to place. This lecture is part of the Museum as Hub program, and furthermore one of the various supporting programs of Insa Art Space's Dongducheon: A Walk to Remember, A Walk to Envision, currently on view at the New Museum's Museum as Hub space.

NOTE: The New Museum has postponed this event to a later unspecified date. This event listing was composed previous to this and published regardless; it will be reposted when the Museum reschedules the event.

Atlantic Avenue Art Walk
7 June - 8 June 2008
Various locations, Brooklyn NY

In addition to this weekend's Bushwick Open Studios and Arts Festival, a little further south the fifth annual Atlantic Avenue Art Walk also takes place, stretching across the borough in an offering of events, screenings, performances, and open studios. The Art Walk is a self-guided tour through the neighborhoods of Brooklyn Heights, Cobble Hill, Boerum Hill, Gowanus, and Downtown Brooklyn along the historic avenue. All Art Walk events are free and open to the public. Readers interested should pursue the Art Walk's news and events page and the directions page.

The image reproduced above features one of the projects on view at this year's Art Walk: Shinsuke Aso's Postcard (SPAC), a long-term project that is "part installation, part performance, part micro enterprise" and will be presented at the Atlantic Gardens Storefront (535 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn) by MINUS SPACE. SPAC is an ongoing business venture as performance that produces postcards entirely from found materials and sold afterwards as cheap multiples. The project claims to derive its energy from "from the global market system, in which anything can be a source of business," becoming a double-edged allegory for the limitlessness of privatization (yes, even of discarded cardboard) and the spirit of entrepreneurship while aligning itself with a populist bend — 25 cent postcards perhaps functioning here as the least pretentious of commodities.

Bushwick Open Studios & Arts Festival
6 June - 8 June 2008
Various Locations

BOS Preview & Sample Sale
7:30 - 10:30pm (open bar from 7:30 - 8:30pm)
Friday 30 May 2008
Lumenhouse - 47 beaver Street Brooklyn, NY

The periphery of commercial art exhibition and production sites in this city is a constantly shifting front. Studio spaces, for instance, of artists both emerging and established dot the heavily polluted Gowanus canal on both its sides. Studio occupants catch the lunch hour takeout drift from the South Slope, while long-term development plans are underway to build a 68,000 square foot Whole Foods near the intersection of Third Avenue and Third Street. Industry City meanwhile, an industrial complex in Sunset Park, is now renting spaces to artists and developing arts organizations for a kind of tempered integration of cultural workers into the declining but still active industrial sector. Industry City developers have taken note of the wild, market-driven development cycles of neighborhoods like Williamsburg and DUMBO, the former of which is being intensely reimagined on recent subway ads the city over as the latest fledgling, luxury and culturally oriented neighborhood.

Even changes such as these however might not preclude us from suggesting that there has remained, for some years now, a kind of gravitational center for this periphery in Bushwick – at least here in North Brooklyn. Intrepid would-be gallery owners and artists seem to open new venues here each year, while a few older exhibitors calcify their rightful position in the neighborhood with strong programing. The tenor of many such programs seems more conventional than vanguard, with group and solo shows often hung that could easily be transplanted to a Williamsburg gallery without much modification (and to Chelsea perhaps with some.) Rather than launching provocations at either patrons or peer organizations, many of these galleries and spaces seem instead focused on developing interesting, ongoing programing and forging new entry paths to commercial subsistence for both themselves and the artists with which they work.

The dispersed Bushwick arts community manifests next weekend with a 3-day "self-organized art festival where anyone and everyone in the community is welcome to participate by presenting art work, organizing activities or helping to produce the event." Bushwick Open Studios & Arts Festival is sponsored by local businesses, staffed by volunteers, and promises its usual diverse range of open studios, guided history walks, weekend-long group exhibitions, performances, barbecues, film and video screenings, and probably a few parties. A week before these events, however, Lumenhouse hosts a preview and sample sale event to benefit the festival. The benefit will take place tomorrow evening, from 7:30 - 10:30, will feature an open bar for the first hour, and priced to sell donated art works for the generation of funds for the festival.